Thomas Haden Church as Sandman and Tobey Maguire as Spiderman (left to right) seen here in a scene from the upcoming film SPIDERMAN 3.
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Of course, another movie that fanboys were panting about at Comic-Con was last summer's Snakes on a Plane, which New Line Cinema pumped to the Web audience but declined to screen for mainstream critics. "We thought it was a stupid title, but we wanted to see it," says Garabedian. "There was swearing, snakes biting into breasts." But the fanboys are outsiders for a reason: the rest of America doesn't always share their taste. And the poor performance of Grindhouse, the double feature from two fanboy deities, directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, shows that fanboy love can get you only so far. Plenty of people heard about the movie--a three-hour '70s-exploitation-style gorefest--but decided it was an inside joke they weren't going to get. "There's this perception that the geeks have inherited the earth," says Smith, "but if they had, Grindhouse would have grossed $100 million. It plays to a marginalized culture." A marginalized culture with a big stick. When Disney tried to market the sweetly sad Bridge to Terabithia as the next Narnia, the Web was awash with fanboy invective, not for the film but for the trailer's misleading emphasis on fantasy. In the end Terabithia did respectably with family audiences, earning more than $100 million worldwide, but it didn't pull in the nearly $300 million that Narnia did.
While the best-known fanboys, including Knowles and Garabedian, are caressed by the studios, which invite them to events and film sets and even have publicity divisions to work especially with them, the fanboy effect is most pronounced for smaller-budget releases like Smith's. Shaun of the Dead, 2004's romantic comedy with zombies, became a sleeper hit when horror buffs embraced its zombie-movie in-jokes and morbid humor. Simon Pegg, 37, the British comic who co-wrote Shaun and plays the film's lovelorn zombie hunter, remembers wishing he had someone with whom to share the joy of cinematic subtext when he first saw E.T. in 1982. In one scene, Spielberg dropped in the music from Lucas' The Empire Strikes Back. "I remember wanting to stand up in the theater and say, 'Did you just hear that?!'" says Pegg, whose new film, Hot Fuzz, provides similar moments for fans of buddy-cop movies like Bad Boys II. Other fanboys who have gone on to work in the business include Spider-Man director Sam Raimi; the two Transformers writers, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci; and David Arquette, who showed up for a screening of the horror film he wrote and directed, The Tripper, in a fake-blood-spattered suit. "I can relate more to people at a horror convention than I can to most Hollywood executives," says Arquette. "They're more passionate."
Being a fan helps with the tricky business of winning over fanboys of established franchises, who tend to be a protective bunch. When Chris Weitz was tapped to direct this fall's His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, an adaptation of the first book in Philip Pullman's fantasy series, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, the About a Boy director made the mistake of going online and reading a poll of fan reaction. "I had just barely beaten 'nobody' as the person who would be the best director for the series," says Weitz, who eventually invited some fans onto the set and proved his fanboy bona fides. Of course, the problem with catering to diehards is the potential for being held prisoner by them creatively. "That can paralyze you when you're trying to invent a new thing," says Orci, who ultimately decided that as crazy Transformers fans, he and Kurtzman could trust themselves to fiddle with the original and still preserve what they loved about it.
Although studios are courting the top fanboys now, it wasn't always thus. AICN created a sport of snagging scoops--reviews from test screenings of unfinished films, scripts, artwork--that put Hollywood on the defensive. All that's over now. Indeed, the kind of insider status some enjoy may threaten the biggest asset the fanboys have as far as their audiences go--the fact that they're just movie-obsessed nerds like their readers. But you can't put the genie back into the bottle. The lads have become such objects of fascination for the industry that it has paid the group its ultimate compliment. The movie Fanboys comes out Aug. 17.